Can I come too?

PreS-K-In this cumulative tale, a very small mouse decides she wants to have an extremely large adventure. "'I'll go and find the biggest creature in the world,'" she thinks. Along the way, the mouse meets many animals that want to join her. Stopping by lakes, rivers, and woods and climbing a mountain and visiting a zoo, they finally arrive at the ocean, and the biggest animal is revealed. The mouse is so delighted to have met all the animals and to have found an answer to her question that she curls up in a ball and falls asleep. Her traveling companions then head back to their homes. The meticulously executed colored-pencil illustrations, whether of feather or fur, ferns or foxgloves, are so exquisite that children will become lost in them. Stunning art, paired with a simple poetic text, pulls readers along as they wonder which animal they will meet next.-Paula Huddy, The Blake School-Highcroft Campus, Wayzata, MN (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A tiny mouse yearning for an outsize adventure sets out to find the biggest creature in the world. As she encounters successively larger animals in the wooded setting, the mouse asks each, "Are you the biggest creature in the world?" A frog, kingfisher, cat, otter and others all demur, but each asks to join the search. In addition to woodland and domestic animals, the entourage stops at the zoo to add a tiger and polar bear. (The bear's heard that the biggest "lives in the ocean where the river ends.") Sure enough, the pilgrimsarranged in size from small to large, silhouetted against the setting sungaze at a breaching whale, "as big as an island." As night falls, the animals head homeward, marveling that they'd "never have seen such a wonderful thing" without the little mouse. As she curls up to sleep, she too is delighted to have had such "a very big adventure." Patten's telling, plainspoken if a tad saccharine, suits the tale, and Bayley's lovely, realistic colored-pencil compositions, elegantly framing the well-chosen text type, will attract many families.The evergreen "dream big" message gets a gracious, nicely designed treatment here. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.